Desperate Duchesses

Page 14

“Nasty!” Jemma said looking impressed.
“And then he said that there was nothing worse than a lady whore. And that I had tried to get him to screw one of his best friends, and he must be drunk, because he’d forgotten how damn boring women like me were. And finally he said that if I told Benjamin he would kill me.”
The laughter had died on Jemma’s face. “That bastard!”
“And then he put me out on the street. In the middle of Whitefriars Lane and I didn’t have even a ha’penny. I had to walk all the way home.”
“Double bastard!”
“I never told Benjamin. I left for the country the next day because I was such a coward that I couldn’t face him. I felt so guilty and so—so dirty! But then someone wrote me and said they had announced in Parsloe’s—”
“What’s that?”
“The London Chess Club meets at Parsloe’s. They only take one hundred members, and it’s frightfully exclusive. At any rate, a week or so afterwards they announced that Villiers would be playing Benjamin, in public and for stakes, at White’s. So I knew why Villiers did it. Because of me.”
“Perhaps…”
“I can’t imagine why I flirted with him,” Harriet said. “You’d think I would have had enough of men who prefer to caress pieces of ivory rather than me. It was so paltry of me. And how—how terribly wrong it all went.”
“Life can be like that,” Jemma said quietly.
“And now,” Harriet said, hearing the rank desperation in her own voice, “I just want Villiers humiliated somehow. It’s all I can think of. I have to make it right for Benjamin. I have to clear my slate. I have to, Jemma!”
Jemma reached out and took her hand. “Benjamin is gone, Harriet. There’s no slate.”
“Please.”
Jemma sat still for a moment. Then: “I wouldn’t do this because of the chess match. I can understand Benjamin’s mortification at losing that match. I could never take my life, but I can understand the horror of losing. Benjamin’s reaction wouldn’t be Villiers’s fault. Truly, Harriet. It’s the chess.”
“I hate chess.” She said it flatly, but with utter conviction.
“I’ll do it because he was an utter bastard to leave you in the road, and to say those things, Harriet. No one says something like that to a friend of mine and gets away with it scot-free. The only problem is that I shall have to be rather subtle.”
“Why? I would prefer that he be shamed in front of all London.”
“Because,” Jemma said, “I told you that Roberta is desperately in love with Villiers. She’s determined to marry him, and I promised I would help her.”
“How on earth are you going to humiliate him at the same time as you push him into marriage?” Harriet began to wring her hands.
But Jemma was grinning again. “The two things are by no means mutually exclusive, you know. And I love a challenge. The first thing I’ll do is invite him to my ball.”
“He and Beaumont never speak; he won’t come.”
“He will,” Jemma said. “Leave that to me. Now, are you coming?”
Harriet gulped. “Would you mind very much if I didn’t, Jemma? I can’t tell you how horrible it has been since Benjamin died. Everyone looks at me with sympathy except for people who believe I drove him to it. Lady Lacock always tells me that Benjamin was a cheerful baby, until I feel as if I could scream.”
“We have to solve that too,” Jemma said.
“My life? Some other night,” Harriet said.
“Of course. But you must come for a council of war tomorrow morning.”
“Please, Jemma…may I decline? I promised I would return to the country as soon as possible.”
“Who did you promise? You should be here for the season, Harriet, thinking about marrying again. You can’t stay a dour widow forever.”
“I know,” Harriet said, and then, desperate to change the subject, “I still don’t think you’ll be able to get Villiers to enter this house.”
Jemma just smiled.
Chapter 5
R oberta would be the first to admit that life with her father had not been designed to turn a young lady into a leader in fashion. It wasn’t that her father had no money; she rather suspected that he had quite a lot. But his priorities were directed in precisely the opposite direction than everything about which Roberta dreamed: London, balls, love, marriage…
“But Papa,” she would argue with him at supper, “you don’t wish me to live with you my whole life, do you?”
“I would love that!” he would say, beaming at her. “Who else will catalog my poetry, if not you, my dear? And your criticism, though occasionally harsh, has done much to improve my art. Much! Much! The future will preserve a warm place for you as the muse of the Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury.”
“Papa,” she would say (for variations on this theme had recurred for years), “I don’t want to appear in history books as your muse, and I dislike cataloging poetry.” Sometimes she would add that she didn’t like critiquing poetry, either, but that depended on how recently she had torn apart one of his new poems.
At this, the marquess’s face would fall into tragic lines, and he would begin to mutter about the serpent’s tooth that was his only child. And if she begged a new gown, he never said no, but he would only pay for Mrs. Parthnell in the village. “If we don’t employ her, child, who will?” One of Mrs. Parthnell’s peculiarities was that she refused to line a sleeve in anything but white cotton duck, and due to sewing problems she routinely encountered, the white generally showed.
Even so, the faces of Jemma’s French maids were almost comical in their dismay when they beheld Roberta. Her gown had once been styled à la française, but Mrs. Parthnell had cut out the floating back pleats and used tapes to draw up the sides around into a clumsy polonaise instead. When Roberta objected to the way the waist bunched as it encountered the new bustle, Mrs. Parthnell cut out the bodice and replaced it with one of melon-colored cotton.
Apparently, Roberta’s sense that melon-colored cotton and burgundy silk were not a perfect match was correct, if the rather piercing screams of the French seamstresses could be taken as evidence.
Two seconds later she was stripped to her chemise and Mrs. Parthnell’s gown was thrown in the corner. “For the beggars,” Jemma’s femme de chambre, Brigitte, had explained. “None of us could wear such a thing.”
There was a cheerful little chorus of French agreements from Jemma’s other two maids. Formal gown after gown was brought out, discussed at length, and ceremoniously carried back to Jemma’s dressing room, which Roberta could only imagine as crammed with satins and silks.
Brigitte had explicit directions from the duchess herself. “She must look like a young lady of the utmost innocence,” she dictated. After a half hour or so of gowns trundling from the dressing room to Roberta’s chamber, it became clear that very few of Jemma’s gowns were designed to achieve an innocent air.
The few that were tried on Roberta quickly lost their claims to innocence, though Roberta thought they were exquisite. Even catching a glimpse of herself wearing one of Jemma’s dazzling French gowns made her heart sing. She didn’t look like a drab country mouse anymore: she looked beautiful. Visions of the Duke of Villiers on his knees spun dizzyingly through her mind.